1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for utilizing a portable communication terminal to manage a document or an image.
2. Related Background Art
With the progress of a computer and a network technique, information is often computerized and treated on the display of a computer. However, the convenience of paper is still high, and documents printed on paper are often utilized. For example, a document used in a conference is printed on paper in advance and distributed to participants of the conference. Although the participants bring back the distributed paper handout, they must read the paper handout by an image scanner to convert it into an image electronic document or perform character recognition to convert the handout into a electronic character document in order to manage this documentation on each of their own computers.
However, the material distributed in the conference is originally an electronic document created by an organizer of the conference with a word processor on the computer. If the original electronic document is available in any manner, the processing for converting from the paper material into the electronic document is unnecessary, and conversion errors during the conversion processing are not generated at all, which is very efficient.
In a conventional example, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 50598/1996, when printing electronic documents on paper, search information of the original electronic document is previously added to a pattern which can be recognized by a machine such as a bar code reader, and the bar code on the paper document is scan-recognized so that the original electronic document corresponding to the paper document is searched and obtained.
Furthermore, a mobile device such as a mobile phone became widely used, and therefore, it is possible to search and obtain necessary information from the mobile device. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 146118/1999 discloses that necessary electronic documents can be searched from a server on a network by using a mobile device, and then printed by a printer designated on the network.
However, there has heretofore been no technique which can efficiently obtain or print necessary electronic information by combining the paper and the mobile device with convenience.